Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders, and she has since emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. In We Will Be Jaguars, she partners with her husband, Mitch Anderson, founder of Amazon Frontlines, digging into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, and hacking away at racist notions of indigenous peoples.--Description from NoveList

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. (Description from catalog.)

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territoty, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history ... Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. (Description from catalog.)

The author presents a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.
(Description from NoveList)

Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. With World War II raging in Europe, the inn is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war.
(Description from catalog)

After finding a tarnished silver spoon humming with otherworldly energy, Metis millennial Lucky St. James, familiar with the magic of her Indigenous ancestors, and her cantankerous grandmother Stella are welcomed into the fold of Ven.Co -- a network of witches working to return women to their rightful power. (Description from NoveList)

On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be in life: she's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn. Her ever-charming husband Steve is nothing but supportive and they've just moved into a new home in a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto, a generous gift from her in-laws. But Alice could not feel like more of an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from Steve and their picture-perfect neighbors, amongst whom she's the sole Indigenous resident.
(Description from catalog)

A forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force, Rita Todacheene, who sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues the other investigators overlook, is caught in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerque's most dangerous cartels when a furious ghost sets her on a path of vengeance. (Description from NoveList)

A historical novel based on the life of the National Book Award-winning author’s grandfather traces the experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights. (Description from NoveList.)

In 1930s Denver, Luz "Little Light" Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, begins having visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory where she must save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion. (Description from NoveList)

It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church-a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But she does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.
(Description from catalog)

Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago.
(Description from catalog)

A young Native American boy in a splintering family grasps for stability and love, making all the wrong choices until he finds a space of his own.
(Description from catalog)

A young Cree woman is tormented by vivid dreams from before her sister's untimely death and wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands before returning to her rural hometown in Alberta seeking answers.
(Description from catalog)

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted serial killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.
(Description from catalog)

When the facts surrounding her boyfriend Roddy's apparent suicide don't add up, Noemi, suspecting something sinister is stalking their tribal lands, relies on help from her uncle, who has returned to the reservation, bringing with him secrets, horror and what might be the key to determining Roddy's true cause of death.--Description by NoveList

Both on and off the rez, interlinked characters contend with history and identity as contemporary members of the Seneca Nation. (Description from NoveList.)

Orange delivers a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. A multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.
(Description from catalog)

The story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Maetis women and the land and bison that surround them.
(Description from Amazon)

From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried….
(Description from Amazon)

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. The community leadearship loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair.
(Description from catalog)

When a small town needs her help in finding a missing girl, Maggie Hoskie, a Dinetah monster hunter, reluctantly enlists the help of an unconventional medicine man to uncover the terrifying truth behind the disappearance and her own past. (Description from NoveList.)

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal.
(Description from catalog)